“In vino Veritas. In Aqua satietas. In … What is the Latin for Tea? What! Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone.” -Hilaire Belloc, On Nothing and Kindred Subjects

“The vulgar and cowardly man, he hates small towns.” -Hilaire Belloc, On Nothing and Kindred Subjects

“Wooden houses may or may not last; but farms will last; and farming will always last.” -G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“The whole world is dividing itself into progressives and conservatives. The job of the progressives is to go on making mistakes. The job of the conservatives is to prevent those mistakes from being corrected.” -G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 19 April 1924

“It was the very life of the Thomist teaching that Reason can be trusted: it was the very life of Lutheran teaching that Reason is utterly untrustworthy.” -G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“They will talk of the readiness of St. Francis to learn from the flowers or the birds as something that can only point onward to the Pagan Renaissance. Whereas the fact stares them in the face; first, that it points backwards to the New Testament, and second that it points forward, if it points to anything, to the Aristotelian realism of the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas.” -G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“As compared with a Jew, a Moslem, a Buddhist, a Deist, or most obvious alternatives, a Christian means a man who believes that deity or sanctity has attached to matter or entered the world of the senses.” -G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“In short, it has long been recognized that America was an asylum. It is only since Prohibition that it has looked a little like a lunatic asylum.” -G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“Equality is still the ideal though no longer the reality of America. I should like to conclude this one by emphasizing the fact that the reality of modern capitalism is menacing that ideal with terrors and even splendours that might well stagger the wavering and impressionable modern spirit.” -G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“Yes. From the earth we come and to the earth we return; when people get away from that they are lost.” -G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“Peasants and priests and all sorts of practical and sensible people are coming back into power, and their stern realism may wither all these beautiful, unsubstantial, useless things. They will not believe in the Seventh Heaven Cigar, even when they see it shining as with stars in the seventh heaven. They will not be affected by advertisements, any more than the priests and peasants of the Middle Ages would have been affected by advertisements. Only a very soft-headed, sentimental, and rather servile generation of men could possibly be affected by advertisements at all.” -G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“Nations necessarily die of the undiluted poison called progress.” -G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“I told them my general view of Labour in the very largest and perhaps the vaguest historical outline; pointing out that the one great truth to be taught to the middle classes was that Capitalism was itself a crisis, and a passing crisis; that it was not so much that it was breaking down as that it had never really stood up. Slaveries could last, and peasantries could last; but wage-earning communities could hardly even live, and were already dying.” -G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“What is the matter with the modern world is not modern headlines or modern films or modern machinery. What is the matter with the modern world is the modern world; and the cure will come from another.” -G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive.” -G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“The state of Maryland was the first experiment in religious freedom in human history. Lord Baltimore and his Catholics were a long march ahead of William Penn and his Quakers on what is now called the path of progress. That the first religious toleration ever granted in the world was granted by Roman Catholics is one of those little informing details with which our Victorian histories did not exactly teem. But when I went into my hotel at Baltimore and found two priests waiting to see me, I was moved in a new fashion, for I felt that I touched the end of a living chain. Nor was the impression accidental; it will always remain with me with a mixture of gratitude and grief, for they brought a message of welcome from a great American whose name I had known from childhood and whose career was drawing to its close; for it was but a few days after I left the city that I learned that Cardinal Gibbons was dead.” -G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“In the case of Andrew Jackson it may be that I felt a special sense of individual isolation; for I believe that there are even fewer among Englishmen than among Americans who realize that the energy of that great man was largely directed towards saving us from the chief evil which destroys the nations to-day. He sought to cut down, as with a sword of simplicity, the new and nameless enormity of finance; and he must have known, as by a lightning flash, that the people were behind him, because all the politicians were against him. The end of that struggle is not yet; but if the bank is stronger than the sword or the sceptre of popular sovereignty, the end will be the end of democracy. It will have to choose between accepting an acknowledged dictator and accepting dictation which it dare not acknowledge. The process will have begun by giving power to people and refusing to give them their titles; and it will have ended by giving the power to people who refuse to give us their names.” -G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America